Mall Of America

theme-park rides at the Mall of America

Mall of America, shopping and entertainment complex in Bloomington, Minnesota, U.S., that opened in 1992 and that remained in the 2020s the largest mall in the United States in terms of both area and number of retailers. It was developed by the Canada-based Triple Five Group, which had earlier created the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta (1981), the largest mall in North America.

The Mall of America was built on the site of Metropolitan Stadium, home of Major League Baseball’s Minnesota Twins until 1982. After the stadium was demolished in 1985, the Triple Five Group won development rights with a grandiose proposal for a mega-mall, amusement park, convention centre, and hotel complex. Groundbreaking for the Mall of America took place on June 14, 1989. When the mall opened on August 11, 1992, the fully enclosed building encompassed 78 acres (31.6 hectares) and 4.2 million square feet (390,000 square metres) over four levels. Its 330 retail stores included anchors Nordstrom, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Sears. The mall also featured a theme park called Camp Snoopy, based on Charles Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts, as well as a wide assortment of restaurants and nightclubs and a 14-screen movie theatre. In addition, it was home to the world’s largest car park with 13,000 spaces.

Over the next three decades the mall continued to thrive, in spite of a growing trend toward online shopping, the closure of anchors Bloomingdale’s (2012) and Sears (2019), and the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the shopping centre to close for three months in 2020. It was also the site of two separate shootings in 2021 and 2022, with two individuals sustaining non-life-threatening injuries in the first and no casualties in the second. Suspects were arrested within weeks of both incidents.

Various changes were made to the Mall of America over the years. An aquarium was added in 1996, and the theme park became Nickelodeon Universe in 2008. The shopping centre’s transit hub came to include not only bus service but also light rail to and from downtown Minneapolis, St. Paul, and the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport. The mall undertook a major expansion and renovation that was completed in 2015.

By the mall’s 30th anniversary in 2022, an estimated 1.2 billion people had visited in total. It had grown to encompass 5.6 million square feet (520,000 square metres), with more than 520 stores, large enough to merit its own ZIP code. The theme park was, at 7 acres (2.8 hectares), the biggest indoor theme park in the United States. The mall contained 50 restaurants ranging from food-court staples to fast-casual and bar-and-grill to white-tablecloth eateries. A comedy club was located on the fourth level. Rides in the theme park included five roller coasters, a Ferris wheel, a log flume, a drop tower, and a carousel. Other entertainment options in the mall were an escape room, a Crayola crayons attraction, a flight simulation ride, two miniature golf courses, laser tag, virtual reality adventures, go-karts, axe throwing, a 34-foot- (10.4-metre-) tall LEGO robot, a gaming studio, three arcades, and a mirror maze. The aquarium and movie theatre continued to operate in 2022. In addition, there were thousands of live plants as well as 300 trees growing within the mall.